Painting over the rot

I’ve been watching the media circus surrounding the resignation of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. If a more inept bureaucrat ever lived, the best they could do is hope to tie with her for last place. Yet we have so-called “jounalists”, or at least those who would like to be thought of as journalists, so engaged in spin it is almost unseemly. Well it is unseemly. In fact, it’s nauseating.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein hails the success of the Five Year Plan: “Obamacare has won. And that’s why Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius can resign.” If Sebelius had quit during what Klein calls the “catastrophic launch”–see what we mean?–it would have been a sign of White House “panic” and “made it harder to save the law,” Klein argues.

It’s surely true that the immediate political risk of Sebelius’s resignation is considerably less now than it would have been then. In October it might have emboldened vulnerable Senate Democrats to abandon ObamaCare or at least press for serious legislative fixes. It’s late for that now. By maintaining party unity this long, Obama probably bought enough time to assure that Congress won’t threaten what is invariably called his “signature legislative achievement” this year.

“In other words,” Klein writes, “the law has won its survival.”

Has it? Has it really? There’s nothing to this point that assures the “law has won its survival”, and, as we’ve been warned constantly, the worst is yet to come – that is when the President quits arbitrarily delaying the “worst”.

I mean, Klein’s nonsense is reminiscent of Baghdad Bob’s assurances that the Iraqis were winning, for heaven sake.

We discussed it on the podcast this week and we’ve mentioned it over and over again … we are terribly ill served by our “journalists” and the “news” media in general. Where once upon a time they actually inspected what government did and helped ensure that it didn’t get outside the lines, it now aids and abets it straying beyond those boundries. We now, literally it seems, have a class of “journalists” who think it is their job to hide the truth in order to advance their political agenda.

Ezra Klein is one of those. Anyone who ever takes anything the man says seriously again, is a fool.

Bogus numbers, all up and down…The changes [in Census Bureau questions] are intended to improve the accuracy of the survey, being conducted this month in interviews with tens of thousands of households around the country. But the new questions are so different that the findings will not be comparable, the officials said.
An internal Census Bureau document said that the new questionnaire included a “total revision to health insurance questions” and, in a test last year, produced lower estimates of the uninsured. Thus, officials said, it will be difficult to say how much of any change is attributable to the Affordable Care Act and how much to the use of a new survey instrument….

I’m speechless. Completely inexcusable. The administration deserves all of the criticism it will get, and then some. http://t.co/nQEzctGKKW
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) April 15, 2014

The law is in there forever. Do you think these Republicans who are not going anywhere anytime soon have the courage and sense of duty to take away an entitlement? They’ll be depicked as killing babies on the operating table (ironic I know). None of them will do anything but tweak it a bit for their cronies.

He’s sort of right though. I don’t see the GOP ever repealing. Now a GOP President using Obama precedent, can probably Executive Order it out of existance, but who will do that? Pres. Cruz or Paul…..MAYBE.

But that’s fine. Mongrel asked “how many get hurt”? to which I say “as many as possible, as far as I am concerned”

That’s assuming we get a Cruz or a Paul and they aren’t a bait and switch.

When it comes to EO’s the standard double standard will apply. They’ll ressurrect the objections we gave about Obama doing it and call us hypocrits as a way to avoid tendering their own opinions on it and being hypocrits themselves but the inferrences between the lines will be its the crime of the century.

Its the space we try to fight in, ideas, ideals and policy. They work on people space. Because at lever pulling time, the undecided are not voting on policy they are voting on people. To make it worse its primarily not on their character but rather their likability which is at issue.

The Law is there forever. There was only one shot however slim at really stopping it and that was if Romney had won in 2012 or GOP took the Senate. It could have been gutted. If we had both it could have been stopped.

Thus, I’d say it is more likely that parts will survive and parts will die.
If you are a cynic’s cynic, then assume all the expensive but “popular” parts will survive, but all the taxes will not.
I’d normally say that as well, but I think without the mandate the exchanges will flop.
So, I’d expect businesses all get exempted, etc. All the payment stuff gets killed off. Exchanges and subsidies are kept, though policies may be scaled down in breadth so their price can be reasonable. The mandate will get beefed up to force more people in. Really, this is not a constitutionally sound policy IMHO, but it does work in Switzerland.
Healthcare costs will continue to soar. Nothing will really be solved except forcing some people to buy insurance and redistributing some income.
OTOH, since the subsidies are very visible, this whole thing may go down.
People paying more get very angry, while people getting “benefits” may decide they suck. We had a story out of the bay area, where a lady who’d been using the free clinic got Obamacare, but there were no docs in her area…so she’s back in the free clinic. Not exactly a motivated voter since she paid 200 a month to find out it was “junk Obamacare.”

Juicebox Mafia Journolist White House sock puppet Klein?
Take him seriously?
Wait, I need to recalibrate the credibility meter…
Dangit!!! It keeps setting the baseline below zero!!!!
Can that be right?

I had to endure a neighbor showing me the latest New Yorker mag with Obama giving medicine to Congressional leaders.
I noticed he had a picture of Liz Warren near-by and I went with the “He didn’t build that” meme.

There is also a matter of two lawsuits that we should know the results of come summer.
1) the Hobby Lobby etal. religious freedom case.
2) the Federal exchange subsidies that only belong to the states.
A loss for the administration on the first one wouldn’t be all that bad. A loss on the second one would be devastating.

Ezra Klein baffles me. He’s clearly intelligent … but can spin actual true facts to support completely ridiculous positions. I can’t understand whether he’s doing it on purpose (just to advance a position with the true believers and try to provide them with plausible talking points to use in the commenting section of blogs and in bars at night) or whether he actually believes it. Which in fact, may be even worse.

Its very simple. They are intelligent and actually know that their system cannot work (or it must be dependent on the strong horse of capitalism) but their ideological guy keeps saying “but a top-down system must work! Its crazy to let people make their own decisions! If we could just cut out profit we could…you get the idea.”
So, you have actual theoretical understanding meeting gut level beliefs and the gut level beliefs win.
This probably occurs on our side as well.
My pet theory is that both sides are stymied by the 20% of the population that are complete dolts.
So, the lefties see people living in squalor and say “we need to help those unfortunates” when in fact, many just don’t want to work and prefer squalor, and a host of smart scumbags will exploit your generosity as well. And when they try to control the rich side of the equation, they get the reverse…productive people start to work less, and some smart scumbag sets up his Solyndra.
And the righties say, “if we didn’t have a welfare net, these people would work and save and be responsible!” when in fact many would not. We do get the rich side correct, though. Theoretically.
So I guess, we could say both sides get stymied by the left side of the bell curve, but the lefties also get the right side of the bell curve wrong, too.

and this “top down instinct” is not always incorrect for other areas of life. A factory floor manager or an CFO kinda does have to be top down in some respects.
Though, many smart businesses now try to have bottom up, or emergent order embedded where possible.

Its very simple. They are intelligent and actually know that their system cannot work (or it must be dependent on the strong horse of capitalism) but their ideological guy keeps saying “but a top-down system must work! Its crazy to let people make their own decisions! If we could just cut out profit we could…you get the idea.”
So, you have actual theoretical understanding meeting gut level beliefs and the gut level beliefs win.
This probably occurs on our side as well.
My pet theory is that both sides are stymied by the 20% of the population that are complete dolts.
So, the lefties see people living in squalor and say “we need to help those unfortunates” when in fact, many just don’t want to work and prefer squalor, and a host of smart scumbags will exploit your generosity as well. And when they try to control the rich side of the equation, they get the reverse…productive people start to work less, and some smart scumbag sets up his Solyndra.
And the righties say, “if we didn’t have a welfare net, these people would work and save and be responsible!” when in fact many would not. We do get the rich side correct, though. Theoretically.
So I guess, we could say both sides get stymied by the left side of the bell curve, but the lefties also get the right side of the bell curve wrong, too.

In all seriousness, Ezra Klein is the DC version of Harvey Levin of TMZ.
It’s absurd to call Ezra a journalist any more than Harvey. The both fill the niche to satisfy PR managers in their respective arenas.